Selecting IT sourcing partners and negotiating effective contracts are key to the success of your organization’s IT sourcing strategy. Failure to dedicate enough time to these items will almost certainly lead to issues down the road, either in project failure or not achieving intended goals. In this the second blog on Enterprise Vendor Management, we will review some foundational steps to get you started in the right direction. (Read the first part on Framing a Better Sourcing Strategy)

Selecting a partner

Before deciding who you want to purchase services from or partner with, you must clearly define your goals and requirements including timeframe and budget. If possible, do this without a specific partner in mind to avoid tailoring your requirements. Depending on the scope of your project, you may want to issue a formal request for proposal (RFP).

For several years, EMC IT has been on a journey toward ITaaS and has gradually evolved the structure, culture, and role of its organization to better align with the needs and objectives of the business. This organizational transformation has touched every aspect of IT—from architecture, infrastructure and application development, to the way in which IT services are created and funded, to enterprise security and support.

No longer does IT hold a monopoly on technology. Instead, EMC is building new consultative relationships with the business, streamlining business units’ access to IT services, and creating new job functions centered on providing the business with not only the services it needs, but, just as important, an outstanding customer experience.

In addition, EMC IT is helping business units reduce risk by building controls into the services it offers, rather than attempting to bolt security onto services that already are being delivered.

This animated video provides an overview of EMC’s IT Transformation journey, from a reactive IT organization to a true service provider. For more information about the EMC IT Transformation, read the latest white paper titled EMC IT Redefined.

When it comes to running your IT operation like a business to deliver IT as a Service (ITaaS) and competing with outside providers, Service Portfolio Management (SPM) is where the rubber meets the road.

SPM is the process by which your IT organization makes sure your service catalog is providing the right mix of services that will meet customers’ needs and deliver business value while at the same time enabling you to be a financially viable service provider. Or, put in plain business terms, SPM is how you make sure you are selling the right product mix to meet your customers’ demands (and needs) at the right price to keep you in business–to keep IT relevant. It is basic supply and demand.

That said, achieving SPM as you transform your traditional IT operation to ITaaS has its challenges. EMC IT has been in the process of transforming to an ITaaS model for several years now. And just as our transformation journey has been a learning process, so has our journey to effective SPM.

The journey to the Third Platform is forging new requirements, skills and expectations of the evolving employee. To stay ahead of the curve and fulfill the opportunities associated with emerging technologies, CIOs must tap new resources to acquire global talent that drives innovation. Such is a key mission of the EMC Centers of Excellence, where EMC is constantly breaking new ground to the benefit of the enterprise and our partners and customers.

In the latest edition of Coffee in the Café with Vic Bhagat, Vic traveled to the EMC Israel Center of Excellence. There, he met with Orna Berry, Vice President of Growth and Innovation, to discuss how EMC is finding, fostering and developing talent in a hot bed for technology.Continue reading →

All organizations need to strategically manage their IT sources to fulfill their needs in the most efficient way. Many companies leverage hundreds of vendors to support their IT operations as well as a select core of strategic partners with whom they collaborate for mutual success.

At EMC IT, we are incorporating industry best practices into a newly launched Enterprise Vendor Management Office (EVMO) to bring our IT sourcing strategy to a new level of efficiency.

Over the last three decades in this industry, I’ve seen many impressively disruptive waves of technology, but I have never witnessed as many waves hitting simultaneously as we are seeing today.

While we can and will pursue many of these, as CIOs in a hypercompetitive global environment, we have to catch the wave that makes the biggest impact on enabling the business and accelerating our revenue and business growth. In 2015, I predict the highest priority for CIOs is digitization.

As the digital economy pushes enterprises to analyze and solve problems faster, businesses are asking CIOs and IT professionals to help reduce complexities, improve synergies across organizations, and leverage existing information regardless of where it resides. For instance, my team is extending our data lake architecture capabilities to enable multiple organizations to make data-driven decisions and accelerate the value for the business like never before. To do this, CIOs and IT professionals must:

In describing our journey to Redefine our IT organization at EMC, I told you how we brought in consultants to help us bridge the old IT world with the new, devised a fresh strategy and workstreams to execute on our roadmap and used added insights about our customers to define wins for IT. What we still needed to do beyond those milestones was to determine what our new organization would look like; we were struggling with several organizational components.

While we had broken down some technology silos in the past, we still had not taken the leap fully into a services-based organizational structure. We still had “sand in the gears” with respect to how teams worked together. Each group had its own goals and objectives, and what was important to our end customer was too often getting lost in the “interlock.”Continue reading →

In an ongoing video series, EMC Chief Information Officer Vic Bhagat and EMC leaders discuss the changing landscape of IT. From maturing partnerships with the business to redefining IT to be more contemporary, Vic and his guests explore how the industry is evolving to maximize agility and improve responsive times to business demands.

The latest edition of the Coffee in the Café with Vic Bhagat features EMC Chief Information Security Officer Dave Martin, who offers a look into how EMC is taking a new approach to data protection — leveraging the latest in analytics and other predictive tools – while maintaining a positive, more functional user experience.

Smart data visualization is proving to be an essential tool in maintaining increasingly complex Big Data systems in the cloud.

The adoption of Big Data tools and technology heavily relies on distributed scaled out computing. One of the main differences in this setting is that it includes systems that operate as a whole on top of several independent hosts. These hosts coordinate their actions with limited information and as a result maintenance complexity significantly increases. One way to overcome this challenge is smart data visualization, which helps the IT experts and management pinpoint the source of problems quickly.

The need for smart visualization is not unique to this problem. Representing complex data as a concise picture which tells decision-makers a story is a key part of any data analytics or data science project. Valuable results of a rigorous analysis may remain undiscovered due to a lack of a visualization clearly communicating the underlying information to the reader. The importance of data visualization is not a novelty. A number of visualization tools, as well as a general interest in data visualization topics, have exploded in popularity in recent years, as evidenced by the proliferation of literature available about infographics and visualization arcanum in both print and online media.

On the road to IT-as-a-Service, transforming your IT infrastructure and applications is the easy part, comparatively speaking, that is. The really tough part is transforming the people and processes, and it’s also what differentiates the most successful IT transformations.

So you’ve virtualized your environment, set up your on-premises private cloud and connected it with a public cloud solution. You have a hybrid cloud up and running and you’re on your way to delivering IT-as-a-Service. Now that you have the hardware and software operating, how do you get your people operating in a new way – with new processes and structure — that allows your business to capitalize on the new IT agenda to deliver more business value than ever before?

A few months ago, EMC IT successfully migrated its mission-critical, SAP Business Warehouse (BW) from an Oracle database to SAP HANA, an in-memory, relational database management system that offers several benefits over our existing system.

Not only is SAP HANA providing us with speed and efficiency needed to meet today’s growing demand for real-time business analytics, it is also allowing us to showcase how several EMC technologies can be leveraged in combination with HANA to create a contemporary IT architecture.

EMC implemented an SAP-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in 2012, to replace its decades-old, Oracle-based ERP system. However, since SAP HANA was still very new and developing at that time, we waited more than a year to migrate our Business Warehouse database from Oracle to a now-evolved SAP HANA-based system. In the meantime, our data volume grew and our business reporting process to analyze and report on key data was slow and not so efficient.

I had the distinct pleasure of presenting to many local CIOs and IT professionals at Evanta’s CIO Executive Summit in Boston last Tuesday. In speaking with a variety of attendees, one common topic revolved around how we must change our conversations and working relationship with our business users.

It is no surprise that today’s business leaders are faced with a trifecta of challenges – unwavering competitive pressures; shifting business and budgetary priorities; and unprecedented new technologies, such as cloud, analytics, mobility and social media. Traditionally, we would do all we could to help, but were often handcuffed by a budget-driven, multi-year command and control processes for IT projects.Continue reading →

Sometimes simple steps can lead to substantial insights in the midst of transition. One such instance proved extremely valuable in our Redefine IT effort.

In my previous Redefine IT blog, I described the structure of our IT transformation program, the workstreams we used to reshape our organization, and our pursuit of a more inclusive process for driving change. In this installment, I want to share an elegantly simple exercise that ended up bringing new focus to our IT Strategy.

As our transition to IT-as-a-Service was taking shape, we decided to actually spell out our IT Strategy and how it connects with what matters most to EMC. We have always had an implied IT Strategy that was tightly aligned to EMC’s corporate strategy; however, we had never written it down, and consequently there was varied understanding of it across our IT organization and across the company. Continue reading →

As we in IT security scramble to put more and better controls in place to combat a changing array of cyber threats, we as an industry are facing an interesting dilemma: How do we assess the usefulness and value of all the controls we have deployed over the years and continue to have in place?

After all, as I talk to people across the cyber security industry, I almost never encounter anyone who can tell me a story about having turned off a security control once they turned it on. Yet, with the changing threat landscape, we clearly need to be adding new security technologies and processes to our already substantial arsenal.Continue reading →

It may not take a village to create cohesive IT architecture in a changing high-tech world, but forging a small community of Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) and Chief Architects is proving to be a helpful tool. At least that is the consensus of the feedback EMC and VMware have gotten to our Chief Architect/CTO Forum that debuted at EMC World last spring.

As an IT Architect I can tell you that CTOs and Chief Architects don’t just focus on technology, though it is certainly central to their world. They also deal day-to-day with a more holistic set of problems, including resources, employee skill sets and ensuring that their organization’s architecture comes together as need. And, until earlier this year, they didn’t have a place to discuss these challenges with their peers at EMC events.

In May at EMC World, however, we decided to give this unique group of professionals a chance to do just that at our first Chief Architect/CTO Forum. We invited some 20 CTOs and Chief Architects to a day-long event in the midst of EMC World 2014, which ran from May 5-8, 2014 in Las Vegas. I co-hosted the event with Job Simon, Vice President, IT Architecture and Strategy at VMware.

As I noted, we were stalled. While we had achieved significant benefits from adopting a standardized and virtualized infrastructure, we had an operating model and 2,000-person organization that had one foot in traditional IT and one foot in ITaaS. With EMC Services’ help, we regrouped, assessed our model’s maturity level and created a clearer roadmap to move forward. The next step was creating the workstreams to execute against that roadmap; reshaping our organization’s processes and the roles of our people in the new ITaaS world.

Big Data is changing the way IT organizations operate and deliver solutions to the business. It is a new, contemporary approach for IT to help business users harness and interpret information to drive more efficiency, productivity, performance and value for the business. As EMC IT embraces Third Platform, we are breaking new ground with Big Data analytics to better position the organization to deliver a more competitive solutions.

EMC CIO Vic Bhagat (@VicBhagat) addressed this topic and more in a recent interview with the Pivotal Blog, tackling the questions, challenges and opportunities facing both EMC IT and global CIOs. Where can IT organizations begin? How can they drive new behaviors? How should they address internal clients?

Flash technology isn’t just for storing your most critical data anymore. Thanks to all-flash storage arrays with super-efficient, in-line deduplication capabilities, flash can now be the most cost-effective choice for your less critical storage needs as well.

This can be illustrated by two use cases we’ve developed for EMC’s all-flash, solid-state clustered storage system, XtremIO. The first is virtual desktop infrastructure. I know what you’re thinking—why would you want to use the most expensive storage for one of the less expensive applications, virtual desktops? To provide a consistent desktop experience and to save money, actually.Continue reading →

Technologies such as mobile, social networking, analytics and cloud computing are changing the security landscape, and security technologies are rapidly evolving to address that change.

It’s not just the technology that needs to change, however: security teams need to change as well.

EMC has evolved and must continue to evolve our security team to effectively combat the threats of today and tomorrow. The core skills essential to expand include business engagement and awareness; a consultative approach; the ability to sell or “market” security; and creative control design for the mobile and cloud-enabled world of tomorrow.

The “King” was at the center of an integrated marketing campaign our Global Security Operations ran this spring to encourage IT users to avoid clicking on suspicious email links that could lead to phishing attacks on our company’s data.

The several-week advertising effort featured a videotaped parody of the Elvis Presley song “Suspicious Minds,” in which ITers acted out why users shouldn’t click on “Suspicious Links,” It also featured a security awareness contest.

The campaign resulted in more than double the number of users reporting phishing attempts via suspicious emails. It also substantially increased the number of users going to our security awareness site, which we call FirstLine in recognition of the fact that the actions of IT users are the first line of defense against cyber-attacks.

A Practitioner’s Guide: The EMC IT Transformation

A whitepaper exploring the EMC IT Transformation

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